Except it’s not a novel. This is Penn State.
When universities become so dependent on athletic departments for their very existence, to the point where nothing – nothing – seems vile or heinous or repugnant enough to shake that iron grip, then there is something desperately wrong with American universities. When any game becomes so powerful that football coaches can play God to entire towns, cover-ups this massive are blatant and where so many people knew and did nothing, when students riot after the filth lurking under rocks start to come out not in protest of the crime but in reaction to the loss of their beloved coach, then Penn State needs to be shut down.
Completely. Dismantled, not a brick left standing. Salt poured on the ground so nothing grows there again. This isn’t just a case of a single bad-apple, not just a small, isolated or one-off event. A man raped children while his friends deliberately covered up his crimes. For years. All in the name of protecting football. The extent of depravity metastasizing an entire town because of the power embedded in one university’s athletic department is on a scale hard to imagine, never mind stomach. The Penn State football program has lost the right to continue to exist.